RULE 20

Be cruel to be kind

Rule 19 was about what to do when the person you love can’t love you back. Now we’re turning the tables. Suppose you just can’t love the person you’re with? Sure, you like them, you enjoy their company, they make you laugh or they listen when you’re upset or they share your interests. You wouldn’t be with them if there wasn’t a lot to like. But you know you’ll never love them the way they love you.

You feel bad, of course – you’re a caring person. You wish you could love them, and you don’t want to hurt them. And maybe you’d be happy to keep hanging out with them anyway. I mean, if there’s no one else on the scene to go out with, and you want to go to the same places, and maybe the sex is good, and anyway you’d miss their family and their friends . . . yes, it would be simplest to stay with them at least for now.

But that’s not the answer. Not if you’re a Rules Player. The longer you stay with this person, the more hoops they’ll have to jump through (trying to make you love them), the more they’ll be hurt when you finally go (and you will go in the end), and the more time they’ll waste with the wrong person (you).

Nope. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind and end the thing now. I know it’s tough. If you care about this person, you’ll feel dreadful hurting them, but remind yourself it would hurt more if you left it even longer. They deserve to be free to find someone who can love them in the way you can’t.

I’ll tell you something else. If you don’t really love this person, sooner or later you’ll find someone you do fall head over heels in love with. Just suppose that person walks into your life tomorrow, or next week. Then what’ll you do?

There’s no really satisfactory answer to that. You could get involved and really, really hurt your current partner. Or you could be hugely honourable and refuse to get involved, but that would be difficult and potentially devastating for both you and your new mystery lover. The only solution that actually works is for you to be free and single already when your new love interest arrives on the scene. And for that to happen, you need to disentangle yourself from your current partner now.

See? The kindest thing for everyone is for you to be briefly cruel, but by doing so to leave everyone free to get on with their lives and make much more of themselves than they possibly can as things are right now. Your partner may not like or appreciate it at the moment, but one day, if they have any sense, they’ll look back and privately thank you for it.